Another noob!

Hi All,

After lurking for awhile, I thought I would drum up a few words as a means of saying Hi and introducing myself.

I am quite new to IM, not so much to tech. I have worked in software for almost 15 years and my day job is as a software architect, so I know app design, OOP, unix, database design and networking pretty well. I hope I may be able to return some help when it comes to scaling & tuning web applications, database optimization and other unix, techy stuff. When it comes to design, I fall short and don’t have much of an artistic eye, but I can write, so content generation should not prove to arduous a task.

My goal is to eventually generate some passive income as a possible side line to my day job. I figure it makes more sense doing this every evening then whirling away the hours playing skyrim all night. I don't have any get rich quick ideas, and I am willing to work consistently over a period of time by carefully pruning and maintaining. My first goal is to make $100 to pay for hosting / domain registration costs. After that it’s to make $50 a month and from there I plan to scale up, with the prize outcome being me able to live off the income (but I don't believe that will happen without a lot of effort and so my day job is my priority for now). I figure the skills I have should make me some direct money, instead of a corporate.

I now have my first site up:

EDIT: I had to remove link, fair enough I can see why that's the case, will post later.

It’s the only niche I could think of so far. The content is building up and I have a twitter account and facebook fanpage which are the main traffic drivers for now. I don't expect I will have any search traffic for awhile until Google ranks me higher. I have optimised it for SEO and have submitted some articles out there to link back. Other then that I have not done to much more.

I am using Amazon affiliate marketing and I have a sneaking impression that the sales page might suck. I found it difficult to come up with a way of covering a global customer base (so as to provide a local product to each country, rather than offer a US located product to UK customers or vice versa). In the end I used a wordpress plugin which redirects links to the country domain prefix (.com, .co.uk, de etc). But I am sure I can make this better - perhaps I should just use the stock amazon links which render the price, image with an amazon logo?

If anyone has any advice on presenting the page better or how to serve a global customer base better, then please do suggest. Perhaps it may be better for me to consider adsense in time, if and when I get more traffic.

I have so far avoided paying for any tools as I don't want to get caught up in spending money and chasing my tail - I would prefer to understand the ropes better first. I am very much a belt and braces man, so I don't mind trying to crunch the numbers myself so at the least I understand the principles at work.

Anyway thanks in advance, I look forward to conversing with you all and thank you for the help so far.

Luke